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GUADEC 2012: state of calvaris

Executive summary

Organization

There was always something to do here and there, which I needed to help with, but I think the most important things that I did were:

Organizing the Lightning Talks session, I guess you all remember the sound of the sea and the seaguls that I choose to indicate people that they were running out of time.

I helped Marina and Christophe in organizing the Interns’ Lightning Talks, which you can also guess because Marina liked the sea sound and decided to use it also for their session.

I helped Juanjo in organizing the BoFs. He planned them and I managed them at the indico.

Random stuff

Keeping hackers happy. Having Zeenix at my place implied hanging out almost every day with the hackers for dinner and beers so I needed to do my best to have them properly fed and with the deserved ‘party level’. I took some people to do some sightseeing and to several restaurants like A Roda, O Galiñeiro… I even remember going to a place with live music at Os Maios close to a Pulpeira de Arzúa.

The only bad thing I can think of is that I missed some talks because of having a lot of things to do.

Interesting talks

I attended all the talks I could and just tried to avoid the ones by Igalians because for obvious reasons I already knew what they were about, so I’ll mention the ones that I liked most:

Jacob Appelbaum’s keynote: Personal data exposure is underestimated by most people but it is something very important that we should care about. It would be interesting to have Tor integrated with GNOME.

Every detail matters by Allan: Suddenly you realize that you are in a better mood when using your GNOME 3 and the reason is because there are some guys focusing on having the small bugs fixed that were annoying you without noticing.

MinGW-w64 by Marc-André: Quite interesting talk about tools and recipes to crosscompile your programs for the Evil. This is quite important to help us with the task of showing that the GNOME world is as multiplatform as other options (you would be a fool if you think that you can have everything working like a charm on the Evil when using some frameworks that claim to be multiplatform just out of the box).

i18n by Gil: Random though: No native English speaker developer was on that talk. We really need to improve this. Then we can talk about tools and other stuff. Though I did not attend the BoF, I talked to Fran Diéguez and my wife Laura about some stuff the students of the Universidade da Coruña could help with to improve translators’ lives, maybe combined with GSoC or OPW.

GStreamer talk by Tim Müller: Can’t ever miss it. 1.0 is almost there and it shines!

PiTiVi by Jeff: Constant lol. Cannot wait to see the videos uploaded. Really enjoyed it not only because of it being fun, but because of all the new features coming to our favorite video editor.

Defensive publications: Patents suck in all senses and even more at FLOSS. These guys should be keynoters at all FLOSS events all over the world, because something I learned lately is that people can do things when they unite. If we help with bringing things to the public knowledge before they are patented by others (because Patent Offices workers are far from perfection considering their model that I do not agree with) we can do something. I recommend you to have a look at the Open Innovation Network.

History of GNOME: it is always interesting to look back to see how much we have walked.

Fixed bugs

After speaking to Matthias Clasen, I got the permission to apply the patches I had submitted for GB#613595. This was quite an old bug that I had worked on from the times of Hildon in Fremantle. Just after pushing I realized that I had caused a small regression but fortunately I fixed it before having consequences.